Tag: faith

What if?

“What if?” is a phrase that has been said time and time again. This phrase can create a number of emotions within a person. This phrase can also create a number of scenarios or fantasies inside the mind of a person. But more often than not these fantasies never occur. Other times “what if” can refer to the past and the wanting to change the circumstances of events that have occurred throughout a person’s life. I think every person is guilty of using this phrase. We so often use this phrase out of a discontentment and dissatisfaction for our lives or even more so the desire and want to change parts of our lives that we do not like or are even disappointed with. We become so discontent with our lives we can catch ourselves saying things like, “Well, what if I had,” or, “What if I did,” or, “What if this happened?” This happens very often for people but in reality, there is not much that we can actually do to control life’s everyday circumstances and events. But don’t we so often try?

As followers of Christ, when we say “what if?” what does this say about us and our faith? It’s so easy to lose sight of the intentions that God has for our lives. The world will often bring us to a point in which it tells us we need to be more, or we need to be different than what we currently are. But “what if” I told you that exactly where you are now and exactly what is going on in your life right now is what God intended? What often times will surprise us has never once surprised God. When we want more for ourselves than what we have been given we are saying, “God, you haven’t done enough.” Can you imagine that? Looking at God and telling Him that even though He has done so much for us, we just need a little bit more, or telling Him that something should have worked out differently than what He planned.

Contentment in Christ is where we should strive to be. Content in the timing that God has for our lives. His timing is so perfect that it cannot be understood nor fathomed. Every breath we have is perfectly timed, every step we take is perfectly timed. The people that come in and out of our lives are perfectly timed. All of this timing working toward the plan God has envisioned for the lives of His children. God knows our heart’s desires. He knows our wants and, more importantly, He knows and understands our needs. When life is chaotic or maybe you are at times confused with what is going on, find peace knowing that God has never had to ask “What if?”

Our God is not a God of “What ifs?”. Our God is a God of “I know.” He is a God that you can trust. He is a God that has a plan. He is a God that has perfect timing. He is a God that continues to give and work in our lives even as we doubt Him. Peace comes in knowing that God has always had a plan that is for your good. So, I leave you with this…

“What if” you let it all go and just trusted the plan and timing of such a great Father and God that we have?

The 7 Last Words of Christ | “Paradise”

39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:39-43)

Meditation on the Second Word

The promise of eternal life is not something we have to wait for. At the moment that we put our trust in Jesus, He promises that we have entered into the family of God. Too often we make the terrible mistake of thinking that it is our knowledge of Jesus that will matter. No, dear Friends. It is not whether you remember Jesus in those moments of fear, confusion, or despair. What will matter when we are confronted with our own mortality will be if He remembers us. The only thing that causes Jesus to remember us is faith, for “without faith it is impossible to please God” and Jesus, when he returns, will about one thing, “…When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Do you want to be remembered? Then place your faith in Jesus today.

Hymn of Thankfulness

“Just as I Am” by Wintley Phipps

Just As I Am - Wintley Phipps

Here is a modern take on the hymn.
“Just as I Am (Oh Come)” by MercyMe

MercyMe - Just As I Am (Oh Come) (Pseudo Video)

Faith is NOT Blind

One of the most difficult things in the Christian faith is learning how to bring out entire lives into conformity with God’s commands and purposes. I think the reason I struggle with this is because I cannot see into the future. If I could see how the decisions I was going to make right now were going to impact future events I would have greater confidence in what I was doing.

This may be wishful thinking. It may even be naive to think that we could have this kind of foresight. I do not have a problem with that. What I have learned is that I do not have to see into the future to have a good idea of how a present decision with impact future events.

For better or for worse, people and the circumstances that we find ourselves in do not change all that much. Sure, there are issues of language and culture but, people still have the same basic needs and desires. We all desire to be loved and accepted. We all have fears and anxieties. We all have a longing to live a life of meaning and purpose. I do not believe that people wake up every morning hoping to live a meaningless existence. This kind of hopelessness and ambiguity is something we learn because of what we choose and, to a greater degree, what we go through in life.

We cannot deny that the choices of others affect us. They may even cause us to stumble. I do not ever want to minimize this reality. What I have come to believe is that when we do not have something sure, constant, and immovable in our lives this tendency toward existential angst goes unchecked.

As a believer in Jesus, my faith provides me with a mooring to hope that, even when I fight against it, reminds me that there is someone who is calling me back from the brink. For me, hope is not just an idea. Hope is incarnated in the person of Jesus. He is my hope. He is the one who calls me back to the light when the world grows dark.

Faith in Jesus is not easy. Not because it is difficult to understand what is being asked of us. This life is difficult because we see what is being asked and we have to decide if we are genuinely willing to surrender our desires to those of God. Are we willing to trust that the steps God is calling and leading us to take are safe and sure?

In the end, there is only one way of finding out. That way is to take the first step. We have to begin to walk by faith and in faith before we will ever know. Faith is not blind. It is bold. It looks at what is in front of it and decides to proceed.

Faith is NOT blind. But it is not careless either. It must be thoughtful and measured and, most importantly, courageous.

Six Strings and a Pick: How Playing Guitar Helped Me See The Risk of Plateau

Over the last year I have been playing regularly with the worship team of my church. This has been less out of some burning desire and more because of a need for a guitarist on the team. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy playing, however, I am not a big fan of playing (or singing for that matter) in front of people.

I have always wanted to play the guitar. My grandfather used to make guitars until he became ill and was unable to do so any longer. There were a couple of samples of guitars that he made in his home and I remember admiring them every time we went to Puerto Rico to visit. There is something about the sound a guitar makes that I just love.

Over the years I have played with moderate measures of satisfaction. I would pick it up for a few months and then quit. Then the urge would hit me again and I would work on developing those calluses again. That is always the toughest part, getting your fingers used to the strings. But, after about a week the focus shifts to playing rather than surviving each practice session.

This last go round I have been playing consistently three to four days a week for about an hour or two each time. That is a lot of playing. The reason I share this brief history is due to a conversation I had with the worship pastor of our church. We were talking, and as most good conversations go, we touched on a variety of subjects. As we talked we were discussing the reasons why people do things in life and the catalysts for growth in our individual journeys.

Then, it hit me. The reason I was getting better was not because I was playing more. This does contribute, but that was not a sufficient explanation. I realized that the longer we do something the easier it gets to do. However, to limit any improvement to time served, as it were, would be somewhat shorted sighted. There were two fundamental reasons I was getting better. First, I had to. Second, I wanted to.

Why did I have to? The needs of the worship team required a better guitarist. In order for that to happen, I had to play more and practice more. I had to learn Solfège, songs in two languages and work with two different worship teams because I was it. I had to get better otherwise the worship experience would have been more distracting than uplifting. This is as well and good.

The second reason that I was getting better was because I wanted to. This was the realization I had not considered or recognized until that conversation the other night. Now, this may sound silly, but I hope you understand why this was surprising to me, and should be to you as well. The better we get at something, the greater the desire to be challenged. I did not realize how valuable it was to be confronted with my own growth and realize that there is more to do, more areas where I can experience growth, more opportunities waiting to be explored. I am not going to be a recording artist or impress anyone. I am just trying to push myself a little further. I did not realize that the greatest motivation comes from within us, when we see that there is still untapped potential to be discovered.

What I have realized is that the better I get at anything I practice, the more I am confronted with the risk of plateau. We have to decide if we are satisfied with where we are. We may not even be satisfied with it, but we may be more afraid of changing what we have for something we do not fully know.

The bottom line is this, if you are satisfied with where you are, then stay there. No one is going to get you to move if you don’t want to. No one was pushing me to get better, they were just glad I was doing something. That just wasn’t enough for me anymore. If was fine at the beginning. But the more I played and the more things made sense, the more I began to understand. The more I wanted to improve. I wanted to become a better steward of my time and more effective in my practice. The more I played the more I wanted the play. And the more I wanted to play the better I wanted to be.

There are two question we all have to ask ourselves. They are these: 1.) How long is it going to take for me to realize there is more to learn? And 2.) How intently will I strive to learn it when I do?

The Journey of Faith

Over the last several months God has been teaching me about my journey of faith. There are many things to consider when we talk about faith. We have to define it. We have to understand what it is and how we use it. To often I have found that when the church people talk about faith we do not really know how to make sense of it for ourselves. What ends up happening is we recycle the phrases and ideas that have been taught to us. In the end, we have not really made any advancement in our own journey. We can end up feeling stuck.

I totally understand this. When we think about faith what exactly are we thinking about? Is it something that can even be understood? Can it be quantified? Too often I feel that we talk about faith in esoteric language because (1) we do not know what we really want to say, but (2) we are afraid if someone gives an answer that is more concrete than we are comfortable with we will have to change the way we live our lives. Now, I may be the only who thinks like this, but I can’t help and think that others have had similar thoughts.

I am not trying to question anyone’s motives, I am just reflecting on my own experience on this journey with God. The clearer we get on what it means to walk by faith the hard it is to live any other way. Any and every time we are confronted with truth and we know it is truth we become accountable to what we now know.

How would you describe your journey of faith to someone else?

Death, Mourning, and Pastoral Care

Today was one of those days when you just don’t know what to do. This morning I received word that a friend’s father had died suddenly. Within an hour of that message, a member of my church also faced the same reality. I shared with my wife that there is never a good time to hear news like this. As the person receiving the news about the news I was reminded again of how fragile, transitory, and temporary our journey upon this orb called Earth really is.

Death is a violation of our Souls

I hate death. It is the greatest enemy of our peace of mind. Those who do not think of death–either their own or that of others–live with a carelessness that is both unhealthy and dangerous. Then there are those who cannot get away from a morbid and fatalistic way of thinking about life. Both of these extremes are not helpful. We have to find a way to find balance when contemplating the finality of life.

I did not always believe what I am about to say. But, my thoughts have been impacted by my own experiences and being a witness to how my time on earth is being marked by the growth of my own children. If we are going to make the most of this life we must live in light of our own mortality. I may not like the idea that I will not live forever, but this should not be a hindrance to evaluating my life and making priorities based on the finitude of the same.

What this means is that we must make honest evaluations of who we are, who we want to be, and what we have to do to reduce the discrepancy between the two. Death is the grand equalizer. It puts all of humanity upon equal footing. There is no escaping death’s grasp or results. One day death will take us. The one question that lingers in my mind on days like today is this: When my time is up will I have lived in a manner meriting thi great gift of life?

We all have to ask ourselves this question. If we do not we risk squandering our lives on things that are vacuous and limited.

The truth of the matters is that death is a violation of our souls. It grips us and threatens to hold us captive. This does not need to be so. The Bible offers us a powerful reminder that God has dealt death a death blow. Death has been defeated. It has been stripped of its power and emptied of its venom. Our hope is not found in our ability, but in Christ’s capability to infuse our lives with his own. A mortal life must be sustained by the eternal life of the Son of God. Without his life in us, there is no life for us.

Mourning is a process

I want to offer a word of advice to those who, like me, are hearers of the news about the news. Please stop saying stupid things to those in mourning. The depth of sorrow felt is, at the very least, in proportion to the love felt for the one who was lost in death. If the one who has experienced the loss loved someone for three decades of life, do not expect them get over it or move on in a month, or a year, or whatever other time frame you think is appropriate.

Please, just shut up! Mourning is a process and the emptiness that is left is not something that can be quantified or timed. Yes, we should be on the look out for signs of prolonged depression and sadness. We should stay close enough to know when the one mourning is struggling to make sense of what has happened. We should offer words of comfort and reminders of our love for them. What we should avoid are assumptions of how long the wound a death makes will take to heal in a person’s life.

We should stop and listen more than trying to think of something to say. There is nothing to say. The death of a loved one cannot be truncated into the trite and religious platitudes so many times offered because we don’t know what else to say.

Pastoral Care is doing more by doing less

In my first official church job, I learned some valuable lessons regarding pastoral care that have helped me in the years since. My job as a pastor is just to be present when everyone else just wants to leave. One of the unspoken truths of ministry is that we will encounter people on the worst days and most difficult moments of their lives.

This is not a call to be a superman. This is a call to humble sacrifice. To mourn with those who mourn. It truly is one of the most difficult aspects of ministry. There will be time to speak the truth about salvation and heaven; hope and joy; peace and God’s promises. There will be time to be the “preacher”. The truth of the matter is that in times of mourning what most people need is just another fellow traveler willing to stop.

——————————

I have been thinking about these things all day. I just wanted to put some of my thoughts down before the feelings dissipated.

How have you learned to deal with death and mourning?

What advise would you give to a pastor about caring for those grieving a loss?

Walking through 1st John

In 2007 I had been a youth pastor for a little less than six months. I was very much out of my element. I had never worked with youth before and I wasn’t sure if I had what it took. I was struggling to find my way. I had been reading all about youth ministry, talking with some of the other youth ministers in town and trying to get a feel for what I was supposed to be doing.

During that time I began to read through John’s first pastoral letter. I don’t know how many times I read it over that month, but I know it was at least two or three dozen times. I don’t even know why I picked 1st John to begin with, but I knew one thing, I was reading that letter as if my life depended on it.

After reading the letter, I was impressed with several important realities that formed into convictions that have influenced and shaped the life and ministry. Over the next several weeks (maybe months) I will be walking through 1 John. I hope you can join me on the journey.

Is God’s Word Enough For You?

This morning I witnessed something very interesting. My father, who is also the pastor of my church, read the letter to the Colossians. That’s it. He said a few words before and a few words after, but the whole of the message was the simple reading of the letter.

As I watched the reactions of the various people, I noticed that many followed along for a few verses. Most, however, simply began to listen to the reading. I think many were surprised by the fact that nothing was added to the actual reading. There was no commentary, no explanation, no illustrations, or applications. The Word spoke for itself.

bible-reading

I have become an advocate of reading the Bible the way it was written. Instead of trying to study what other people have said, I have taught people to read the Word of God and engage in it as if it were a conversation. A dialogue with God, using the words on the page to serve as the other side of the exchange.

I think the funniest reaction occurred when, after our early service, I walked out and asked some of those attending, “Is the scripture not enough?” Most of the people laughed at the thought, but I have to wonder if there is something to this. Have we trained our members to rely on the pastors preaching to sustain them? Have we, somehow, drawn people away from God and his Word by not teaching them how to engage and interact with the scriptures?

I guess the question that I have to ask myself is this: Have we become so accustomed to the extra words of the preacher that we are not satisfied with the Words of God? There is no doubt that people are become far more biblically illiterate. Many who come and sit in churches each week do not see the Bible as something they can handle on their own.

I think about the privilege we are afforded to have access to the scriptures in our own language. I think of the many who sacrificed over the centuries to make this opportunity possible.

This morning I was given a real life example. We all must remember that God’s word is the only thing we have to sustain and instruct us on this journey of faith. It really must be enough.

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%